Pete Phillips

Canon ip4500 under Ubuntu 7.10

1 minute read

My old epson 760 stylus kept crashing so I bit the bullet and went for a
Canon ip4500 printer.

One of the reasons for this was that the reviews were good, I had read
that you can print to 3x5 index cards on this series of printers, and
you can also buy cheap ink cartridges at around Â£3.50 per cartridge.

The inks are also individual, so you only replace the one you need, not
all three colours.

I used a windows dual-boot machine to run through the setup under XP, as
the printer comes with a CD which does a printing alignment test. I’m
not sure whether you can do this under Linux at all. This takes about 13
minutes to run, and at the end you are left with 2 pages with some black
and blue boxes on them. It doesn’t tell you what you should be looking
for. As there was nothing flashing, I assumed everything was OK and
proceeded to hit the Next button as instructed on the installation
sheet. In my view this is not helpful!

At present [Dec 2007] the usual CUPS drivers don’t support this model
but the free version of Turboprint does

Downloaded and Installed the files as per the website. Within minutes I
was running the GUI which installed the printer and drivers into CUPS
for me.

Very easy and straightforward. I have printed to a4 and that works fine.
Also tried a4 300dpi draft mode, which really shoots through the
printing at a fast lick.

I have also printed succesfully to 3x5 index cards for the DIY Hipster
PDA cards (see for kits
to download). Although you can’t actually set a custom size to print on
3x5 cards, if you set the width to 3.9 inches by 5 inches, I find that
this actually works OK. the quality of printing on my 3x5 cards
is much better than I was getting with the old Epson.

Note that to get higher resolutions you need to pay for a registration
key. I haven’t needed this yet as I haven’t tried printing any photos.